I'd already seen John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (here in Singapore, done by the Stage Club) and that helped in reading because I don't think I would have followed it in terms of how it might look on stage otherwise. Enjoyed it, but found it a tad narrow in social terms despite its attempt to bridge those degrees.
Preferred reading the other three: Stoppard's Arcadia, Frayn's Copenhagen (both wonderfully TOK-ish in the best sense of that coinage) and Brian Friel's Translations which I've had in mind to read since my niece, Kate, did it for 'A' level in the UK.
I'm struck by the fact that all four are, in a sense, plays that explore ideas. Isn't it strange we should use the stage as a space to do so? Perhaps the important thing is not so much the exploration of ideas in itself as the fact that when we do it on stage it's something we are doing together in a world that is otherwise dangerously fractured.
2 comments:
Interesting, that. John Ratey, in his A User's Guide To The Brain, discusses the brain as a kind of multi-chambered grand theatre, with several kinds of shows going on at different times or concurrently.
When we manipulate objects of increasing complexity but of physical substance (like Rubik cubes, for example), the brain develops fastest. Playwrights, who handle people as actors (in the sense of objects which act in an environment) must be really highly developed...
I suppose a playwright who wrights a play right might be thought of as such. But the handling people as actors bit tends to fall under the purview of the director.
You'd think the collaborative nature of theatre would make all involved highly developed on the brains front, but, sadly, involvement in the dark art of the stage seems, just as often, to make for outsized egos.
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